Al Qaeda Is Dead, Long Live Al Qaeda

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A few days ago I linked to a Washington Post story suggesting that the original Al Qaeda network was all but dead. It was late at night when I posted about it, so I didn’t bother musing on the legal implications of this, but Robert Chesney picks up the ball and suggests that it matters. Sure, he says, the guys in Yemen might call themselves Al Qaeda, but the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force doesn’t care:

The AUMF, famously, encompasses at least the original al Qaeda network and those who harbor it. Whether it applies as well to entities like AQAP is a much-debated question, raising difficult issues regarding both how one defines the organizational boundaries as al Qaeda and whether the AUMF should be read to include, implicitly, authority to use force as well against organizations that can be described as the functional equivalent to co-belligerents (and, if so, what the criteria are for defining that set). With the potential demise of the “core” al Qaeda leadership, these questions will become still more difficult….I expect that this will become an increasingly significant set of issues in the years ahead.

In theory, this sounds right. In practice, we launched a drone war against AQAP in Yemen and no one blinked. Ditto for a military operation against Libya, which had nothing even arguably to do with al-Qaeda. In that case, Congress roused itself from its torpor just enough to growl slightly, but then fell immediately back into a coma. Legalities aside, virtually no one in Congress seems much interested in deciding whether the AUMF has had its day and should no longer be considered an all-purpose excuse for military action in any country that shares a majority religion with Afghanistan.

But they should.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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